To make the wait until a massive (and way overdue) Yosemite overhaul of Tweetbot, the most purchased Twitter alternative on the Apple platform, developer Tapbots on Thursday pushed a small yet important update to Tweetbot for Mac.

This new version at last added official support for Twitter-hosted animated GIFs and video image previews. In addition to these enhancements, this edition of Tweetbot saw improvements in storage and memory usage.

So now when someone attaches an animated GIF to their tweet or records a video in Twitter’s native video format, you’ll see the video thumbnail inline. Previously, it wouldn’t show any thumbnail at all, leaving you with clickable URLs that opened in a browser.

To test this, I uploaded an animated GIF with the updated Mac edition of Tweetbot. The app did show a GIF video thumbnail inline. Regrettably, clicking it causes Tweetbot to open the animated GIF in a browser, like before.

As for native Twitter video, I first attached a short video clip to a test tweet using Twitter’s official iOS app. Again, Tweetbot for Mac rendered the video thumbnail in my timeline but didn’t reproduce it inline.

Release notes accompanying the 5.3-megabyte download encourages fans to stay tuned because “Version 2.0 will be coming out soon”. The Mac edition of Tweetbot requires an Intel-based Mac with a 64-bit processor and OS X 10.7.4 or later.

We’re continuing to work on Tweetbot for Mac 2.0 and wanted to share a screenshot of the new profile view. pic.twitter.com/IpTjqVTXnR